Pension Reforms in the Balkans and their Neighbours
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Date
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Tuesday, 15 March 2016
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Time
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6:00 - 7:30pm
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Venue
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Cañada Blanch Room, (COW 1.11), 1st floor, Cowdray House, LSE, London WC2A 2AE
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Speaker
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Dr Bernard Casey, Personal Social Services Research Unit, London School of Economics
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Chair
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Dr Vassilis Monastiriotis, LSEE Research on SEE, London School of Economics
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Dr Bernard Casey is currently Principal Research Fellow at the Personal Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU) of the LSE and at the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick. He studied at the University of Oxford and the LSE and describes himself as a social economist. He was on the staff of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (Science Centre Berlin) in the 1980s and has been a senior economist at the OECD. Bernard's research into the economic implications of societal ageing has been concerned with age and work, transitions to retirement, employment related social security and long-term care of the frail elderly. He has undertaken studies for the European Commission and acted as a consultant to member state governments, including Austria for its 1998 presidency and, more recently, Cyprus. Currently, he is part of a project investigating the future of “super” – Australia’s mandatory supplementary pension system, and has recently been awarded funding from the European Commission (Horizon 2020).
About the seminar:
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of the countries of central, eastern and south east Europe made substantial reforms to their pension systems – adapting them from those developed in socialist times to ones “more fit for market economies”. In many cases, this involved the establishment of mandatory, funded schemes based upon individual accounts.
However, the fact that these schemes diverted contributions from the public pension system resulted in “transition costs” and, in some cases, generated substantial fiscal deficits. Countries that were members of the European Union, or which aspired to membership, found their earlier pension reforms causing grave difficulties when measured against the targets set by the (revised) Maastricht and Dublin (SGP) treaties.
Some countries have started to back-peddle – to “re-reform” or “un-reform”. The most recent case has been Bulgaria and Croatia where there have been threats of the immanent nationalisation of the funded pension schemes – with the examples what happened in Hungary and Poland being held up as examples of what could happen. In Croatia, too, the private pension funds have been strong-armed into making public, infrastructure investments in return for the government not cutting the share of social insurance contributions diverted to them.
Interestingly, however, countries that had not “reformed” are reputed to be considering doing so – Serbia being the most frequently talked about case. The talk will review the development of pension systems and pension policy in the region over recent years and compare and contrast experiences. It will evaluate reform proposals in the light of national developments and the lessons generated by neighbours.
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A complete listing of the 2015-16 Visiting Speaker Programme is available here.